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Winning the battle, losing the war

To be sure, fighting in Syria has hardened a new generation of Hezbollah militiamen, but it has also depleted the group's ranks and eroded its carefully cultivated image as an organization devoted to "resisting" Israel

A wider commentary in Strife, a Kings War Studies blog, reviews the stalemate between Hezbollah and Israel. The author concludes:

Finally, the events in January 2015 can be considered the latest reminder of a strategic stalemate along the border. The law of talion, ‘an eye for a tooth’[9], which represented the Israeli strategy during the hostilities in 2006, set the pattern for the conflict. Israel and Hezbollah now tacitly adhere to an even-tempered rationale. In the foreseeable future it will be ###-for-tat, rather than all-out war, that will characterise the ever volatile tri-border area.

Police have smashed a cell of Hizbollah agents accused of trafficking cocaine for one of the world's most ruthless drug cartels to fund the militant group's war in Syria. The agents, arrested in France, allegedly masterminded a massive global drug ring which raised millions of dollars to arm Hizbollah gunmen fighting for Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, in Syria.

According to America's Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), they worked directly with Colombian cocaine cartels....

Worth reading especially since the FSA and JaN have been beating up badly on Hezbollah and their IRGC so called "advisors inside Syria.....

By Eli Saslow

The next war against Hezbollah will be ‘ferocious,’ Israel warns

Hezbollah is now a regional military power, a cross-border strike force, with thousands of soldiers hardened by four years of fighting on Syrian battlefields on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad. There are 7,000 Hezbollah fighters in Syria, Israeli commanders say.

Hezbollah troops have been schooled by Iranian commanders, funded by Tehran and have learned to use, in combat, some of the most sophisticated armaments available, such as fourth-generation Kornet guided anti-tank missiles. They pilot unmanned aircraft and fight alongside artillery and tanks. They have taken rebel-held villages with Russian air support.

More than 1,000 Hezbollah fighters have died, the Israelis say; they do not describe Hezbollah as “demoralized” but “tested.”

“In 2006, Hezbollah fought a guerrilla war. Today, Hezbollah is like a conventional army,” said Elias Hanna, a retired Lebanese army general who teaches at the American University of Beirut.

Israel fought the first Lebanon war in 1982 against the Palestine Liberation Organization, a conflict that saw Israel occupy southern Lebanon and lay siege to Beirut. Hezbollah arose during that war. The second Lebanon war broke out in July 2006 after Hezbollah abducted a pair of Israeli soldiers on the border.

Ten years ago, Hezbollah fired 4,000 short-range, relatively crude rockets at Israel, about 100 a day, killing some 50 Israeli civilians. Today, the group has 100,000 rockets, including thousands of more accurate mid-range weapons with larger warheads capable of striking anywhere in Israel, including Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, according to Israeli army commanders and military analysts in Israel and Lebanon.

Hezbollah poses a far greater threat to Israel than it did 10 years ago. The challenges posed by Islamist militant movement Hamas in the Gaza Strip are almost trivial by comparison, Israeli senior commanders say.

Earlier this year, Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot called Hezbollah Israel’s “main enemy” now that Iran’s nuclear ambitions may have been delayed by a decade or more.

Whether Hezbollah’s arsenal of rockets and the overwhelming retaliatory response promised by Israel serves as a dual deterrent is one of those questions that can never be answered — but probably keeps commanders on both sides awake at night.

In Israel’s far north, Misgav Am kibbutz sits on a hilltop above the Lebanon border. There is a popular overlook. There is a gift shop for the tour buses.

On a sunny morning, an Israeli army colonel stood on the hill and pointed toward Lebanese villages at his feet.

“You see villas, red tile roofs, summer homes. You don’t see soldiers in uniforms. They don’t wear uniforms. It looks nice and peaceful, right?” said the commander of a paratrooper reserve brigade, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is serving on active duty on the Lebanon border.

“I see rocket rooms, weapons caches, underground compounds,” he said. “I can pinpoint to you, below, a house with washing on the line that is a Hezbollah outpost.”

Israeli military leaders say Hezbollah has spent the past decade transforming hundreds of villages in southern Lebanon into covert fire bases with hidden launch pads, many rigged to operate by remote.

In briefings with reporters in Tel Aviv, Israeli military intelligence officers in the past year have begun to show aerial photographs of villages in Hezbollah’s southern stronghold.

A photograph of Muhaybib, a town south of here, is covered with red squares marking the placement of what the Israelis say are command posts, anti-tank positions, tunnels and launch pads. Israel says there are 90 buildings in the village of 1,100 people and that 35 buildings are being used by Hezbollah.

The message is implicit: This is a target list.

The Israeli commanders in Tel Aviv and here on the Lebanon border may be issuing propaganda as a warning to Hezbollah. Both sides do talk to each other through the media, yet there is broad agreement in Washington, Jerusalem and Beirut that another Lebanon war could be devastating, especially for civilians.

“Hezbollah is not a group or a organization or a movement. It’s an army. A big terrorist army,” said the paratrooper commander, who is a veteran of the 2006 Lebanon war. “We understand that people here find themselves in the middle. The next war will be a terrible war. I think they understand, too, that the next war will be different.”

Speaking publicly, the Israeli generals promise that if Hezbollah launches mass strikes against Israeli cities, Israel will be compelled to respond, similarly, with 10 times as much force. The commanders say they cannot allow Israeli cities to face 1,000 Hezbollah rockets a day.

Historians say the 2006 war came as a surprise for both sides. Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers at the border, which sparked a sustained aerial and ground war by Israeli forces — and tough resistance by Hezbollah.

Both claimed victory, but neither won. In Israel, the 2006 Lebanon war is widely viewed by Israelis as a military failure. Hezbollah boasted that it had stood toe-to-toe with the most powerful army in the Middle East, but the widespread destruction and civilian deaths were unpopular.

As the 10-year anniversary approached, both Hezbollah and Israel stressed that they do not want another war — even as both declared themselves ready for one.

“Israel knows Hezbollah has missiles and rockets that can strike anywhere in its territory,” the group’s leader, Hasan Nasrallah, said in a speech delivered by video in February.

Nasrallah warned that Hezbollah rockets could strike ammonia plants at the port in Haifa in any future fight, saying that the damage would be equivalent to an atomic bomb and could lead to the deaths of 800,000 people.

“Haifa is just one of many examples,” Nasrallah said. “The leaders of Israel understand that the resistance has the ability to cover the entirety of occupied Palestine with missiles. We must keep this capability because it acts as a deterrent for the third Lebanon war.”

Continued......

Last edited by davidbfpo; 07-24-2016 at 10:04 PM.
Reason: Copied from 2016 Syrian War thread.

Moderator adds

There are a number of posts on Hezbollah's involvement in the Syrian Civil War, in all the threads, IIRC most refer to tactical issues and not the group's overall stance. This thread does not have those tactical posts copied here.

Syria’s Civil War Produces a Clear Winner: HezbollahThe Lebanese militant group, labeled a terror organization by the U.S., has grown stronger through its support of the Assad regime, battling Syrian rebels alongside Russian forces and training local Shiite fighters

Maria Abi-Habib
Updated April 2, 2017 11:31 p.m. ET

Few wars have seen such a tangle of combatants as Syria’s, from obscure and morphing rebel groups to Russians, Turks, Kurdish and Iraqi militias. From the chaos, one clear winner is emerging.
Returning to his ancestral Syrian town of Qusayr after years away, a man named Mohammed discovered a new militia patrolling the neighborhood. Patches on the men’s camouflage uniforms called them the Islamic Resistance of Syria. Their identity became clearer when he found a notice on his house claiming it for Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group.
“Many houses have been confiscated with notices that they’ve been reserved for this or that family,” Mohammed said.
Hezbollah, founded in the early 1980s to fight Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon, became involved in the civil war next door to protect its patrons in Damascus and a supply line of Iranian weapons. After years of growing engagement, including training thousands of mostly Shiite Muslim fighters and beginning to provide social services, Hezbollah is today stronger, more independent and in command of a new Syrian militia that its officials say is ready to be deployed to other conflicts in the region.
Hezbollah now fights alongside Russian troops, its first alliance with a global power. It was Hezbollah that devised the battlefield plan for Aleppo used by Syrian and Russian forces last year, according to Arab and U.S. officials who monitor the group.
Thanks to money and arms from Tehran, Hezbollah now stands almost on a par with Iran as a protector of President Bashar al-Assad’s government, and as a sponsor of Shiite fighting forces in Syria.
“It’s hard to see people rising through Syrian intelligence or military ranks without the blessing of Hezbollah or the Iranians,” said Andrew Exum, until January a U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East.
With its growing might, this arch-foe of Israel, a group long labeled terrorist by the U.S., has gained a modicum of international recognition. It participated in negotiations sponsored by Russia following the rout of rebels from Aleppo. When China’s special envoy to Syria visited Lebanon in December, he carved out time to see Hezbollah’s foreign-relations chief.
Even before the Syrian civil war, Hezbollah had evolved beyond its guerrilla-group origins into a business and political enterprise that holds positions in Lebanon’s government and runs social programs such as schools and clinics. Now it is poised to capitalize on what many Middle East analysts expect will be an eventual end to the Syrian war that leaves Mr. Assad in power. Syria will have $180 billion of war-reconstruction needs, by a World Bank estimate. Hezbollah has experience at that. After a 2006 conflict with Israel, the group efficiently organized the rebuilding of battered Beirut suburbs.
“Hezbollah is well-positioned to make a lot of money” from Syrian reconstruction, said Matthew Levitt, director of the Washington Institute’s Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, a veteran of the Treasury and State departments.
U.S. and Israeli officials have watched the growth of Hezbollah with concern, worried it could draw on its Syrian recruits to pressure Israel from a new front along the Golan Heights, captured by Israel 50 years ago. In March, Hezbollah announced the formation of a Syria-based “Brigade for the Liberation of the Golan” devoted to wresting the heights back for Syria.
“Israel knows that what has happened in Syria has changed Hezbollah, which has developed from not just defending against Israel, but attacking it,” said a senior official from an alliance of Hezbollah, Syria and Iran. “It has now developed traditional and nontraditional means of war. It fights like a guerrilla army but also like a conventional one.”
Israel hasn’t waited for a Hezbollah attack in the Golan, sending aircraft to strike Iranian shipments of sophisticated arms to Hezbollah.
Premier Benjamin Netanyahu told President Donald Trump during a February U.S. visit that Hezbollah’s expanded arsenal also endangers American warships in nearby waters, said diplomats briefed on the meeting.
The U.S. is well aware of Hezbollah’s expanding capabilities and will continue working closely with partners in the region to address threats the militant group poses, a State Department official said, adding that disrupting Hezbollah’s terrorist and military capabilities was a top U.S. priority.
Hezbollah’s new clout is adding to fears among Gulf states that Iran’s power also is growing, drawing Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to agree to work with Israel. Their focal point is now Yemen, where Mr. Trump has agreed to provide a Saudi-led alliance with stepped-up U.S. military assistance to counter the Houthis, who were trained by Hezbollah and supported by Iran. The Gulf states, in turn, have tentatively agreed to try to bring the Palestinians to the negotiating table with Israel.
Religious power
Hezbollah’s role has implications for eventual postwar arrangements in Syria, given how its religious influence will likely compete with the secular politics of the Assad regime. Before the war, that government was improving relations with Saudi Arabia and once even considered a peace treaty with Israel. The improved ties have broken down, with the Saudis supporting Syrian rebel groups. Diplomats in the region say any normalization of relations after the war ends, likely with Mr. Assad still in power, will be even more difficult given Hezbollah and Iran’s newfound clout in Syria.
Hezbollah has helped the Assad regime survive partly by propping up its undisciplined military, which is plagued by corruption and defections. In Syrian villages retaken from rebel control, Hezbollah fighters have been seen holding Syrian soldiers by the wrist or collar and forcing them to return appliances or furniture looted from homes.
Syrian civilians say Hezbollah fighters sometimes openly disrespect Syrian troops on battlefronts, a stark change from its previous deference. Cars with blacked-out windows and Lebanese license plates screech up to Syrian checkpoints, the Hezbollah commanders inside refusing to get off their phones during identification checks or to answer questions posed by their Syrian allies.
When Russia and Syria wanted to put priority on retaking Islamic State’s capital of Raqqa last year, Hezbollah, along with Iran, insisted the focus instead be dislodging rebels from Aleppo to force them to the negotiating table, according to Mr. Exum and a Hezbollah official.
The strategy worked. The rebels evacuated Aleppo and agreed to participate in Russian-sponsored political negotiations now taking place in locations outside Syria.
When formed in the 1980s, Hezbollah was trained by Iran’s Quds Force, an arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that manages Iranian clients across the region. Hezbollah gave Lebanon’s disenfranchised Shiite community political power and won its loyalty by providing free schooling and health care in addition to protection.
Militarily, it remained a guerrilla force, better at launching rockets from the bushes than spearheading offensives on urban centers—until Syria’s civil war began in 2011. After wading in to protect its Iranian arms flow, Hezbollah stepped up its military commitment to counter Sunni extremists such as Islamic State, which regards Shiite Muslims such as Hezbollah as infidels. Hezbollah expanded its arsenal by gaining access to Russian and Syrian weapons under the cover of the civil war’s chaos.
Shipments from Iran gave the Lebanese group precise and powerful armaments that it previously lacked, such as Russian-made Yakhont missiles, said a former State Department official.#Cooperation with Russia on the battlefield further increased the flow of weaponry.
“Russian stocks are open to Hezbollah,” said a Hezbollah official who travels frequently to Damascus. “Our fighters eat and sleep alongside theirs and we’re sharing everything, always.” While an end to Syria’s civil war could change the dynamics, Middle East analysts generally think Hezbollah’s expanded access to weapons is secure.
Damascus was once considered a Hezbollah proxy master, but Western diplomats say the Lebanese group is carving out its own zones of influence across Syria by training local fighters. They include Shiites and Alawites, the latter being adherents of a branch of Shiite Islam that includes the Assad family.
Western diplomats estimate the number of these fighters loyal to Hezbollah’s command, which Hezbollah calls al-Ridha Forces, and known locally as “Hezbollah in Syria,” in the tens of thousands. Hezbollah officials say it is lower. Hezbollah’s presence in Syria stretches 250 miles from the northern tip to the south, longer than the length of Lebanon.
Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to both Iraq and Syria, said the autonomy Hezbollah enjoys in Syria arises partly because “Iraq is more important for Iran in many ways than Syria is,” while to Hezbollah, next-door Syria is more important.
Messrs. Crocker and Exum said Hezbollah’s strategy in Syria mirrors the Lebanese group’s involvement in Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion. At that time, Hezbollah provided training inside Iran to Iraqi Shiite militiamen.

Continued....

Last edited by davidbfpo; 04-03-2017 at 05:45 PM.
Reason: Copied from Syria thread

The activities of a Lebanese environmentalist#group#reported to be a front for Hezbollah were brought to#the Security Council ‘s attention on Thursday, as Israel’s UN ambassador charged that the Shiite Islamist#organization was using the NGO as cover to conduct reconnaissance activities along the “Blue Line” — the border with Israel#drawn by the UN following the IDF’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000.
In a letter to the Security Council, Danon disclosed#recent intelligence gathered by the IDF showing that Hezbollah operatives were located in a series of outposts marked with the logo of “Green Without Borders” — a local environmentalist NGO whose ostensible mission is to plant trees in the locale.
In April, UNIFIL — the UN peacekeeping force in the area — was prevented from approaching a post marked with the#NGO’s flag by a group of Lebanese locals.

The current unspoken partnership between the Lebanese Armed Forces, Hezbollah and the Syrian army is a direct result of the efforts of those who have worked so diligently to keep the Lebanese Armed Forces under-equipped. By doing so, they have also inadvertently strengthened Hezbollah, making it the only viable military force in the country able to repel armed groups along the Lebanese border, and are now creating a reality on the battlefield that everyone is aware of but no one wants to acknowledge.

The Islamist militant group Hezbollah exploded into a major cocaine trafficker for the United States over the past decade — and it happened under former President Barack Obama's watch to help score a nuclear deal with Iran, a report revealed Monday.
Project Cassandra, a campaign launched by the Drug Enforcement Administration in 2008, found that the Iran-backed military and political organization collected $1 billion a year from money laundering, criminal activities, and drug and weapons trade, according to Politico. Over the following eight years, the agency found that Hezbollah was involved in cocaine shipments from Latin America to West Africa, as well as through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States.